Issue of Airline Seats Put To Rest
It's one of those stories that won't change the world, but you
follow it anyway. It's like watching a minor traffic accident in
slow-motion. You want to stay until the bitter end.
We've been following the story of the Arizona
Historical Society and its airline seats. It's a story about some
well-intentioned volunteers, some missed communications and a very
curious FBI agent. Oh, yeah... and it's about terrorism.
The Arizona Daily Star reports it all began when 75-year old
Muriel Keegan, a docent at the Historical Society in Tucson,
starting putting together items for the annual White Elephant Sale.
As is her custom, Ms. Keegan distributed flyers to several storage
facilities around town, hoping to snag long-abandoned property for
cheap and make a profit at the White Elephant Sale.
Ms. Keegan came across 57 airliner seats, three-to-a-row. She
bought them from the storage facility and then... stored them.
That didn't sit well with her fellow docent, Andy Rutter. 57
airliner seats do tend to take up a bit of room. So Ms. Keegan and
Mr. Rutter decided to start the White Elephant Sale a little early.
They put a classified ad in the paper, offering the seats at
$40/row. The turnout was prettygood.
One
woman, Susan, decided she wanted more than one row of the seats, so
she had her son call the day after she made her first
purchase. He asked if any more seats were available, but apparently
forgot to leave a phone number. As good as the turnout was, there
were, incredibly, eight rows left. Now, the question was, how to
get the seats to Susan.
So, Ms. Keegan placed a second classified ad in the paper:
"Attention Susan: jetliner seats, bank of three, eight sets
left."
Here's where the alarm bells started ringing at the local FBI
office.
Ms. Keegan got a call two days later from an FBI agent. He told
her a citizen had called the Bureau in Phoenix and suggested the ad
was a coded attempt to reach "agent Susan."
It took 15 minutes, but Ms. Keegan was finally
able to convince the FBI agent that the seats were real, the ad
wasn't a cryptic terror message and the 75-year old woman herself
wasn't a terrorist.
Ms. Keegan is fine with all that. Better safe than sorry, right?
But Andy, who's a septuagenarian himself, isn't.
"I've had to take my shoes off in De Gaulle airport this summer,
in Juneau, Alaska, and in San Diego," he told the Daily Star. "But
this is the epitome of absurdity."